Joseph Boyden on the novel he was “always meant to write”

Through rows of trees, sugar maples and beech and white birch, Joseph Boyden looks out onto the waters of Georgian Bay. He’s sitting in a Muskoka chair, not far from shore, seemingly lost in thought.

“This was the place of my youth, right over there on Beckwith,” he says, gesturing to the uninhabited island, hidden by trees, a few kilometers across the water, where his family used to camp. “Having grown up around here, and spent so much time here, I knew a lot. But it’s kind of like I thought I knew a lot. You realize you don’t, really.”

Boyden, 46, is one of the most acclaimed Canadian writers of his generation. His first novel, Three Day Road, about two Cree snipers fighting in the First World War, won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award. His second novel, Through Black Spruce, about an aging former bush pilot and his niece, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

His new novel not only revisits the landscape of his childhood but transports readers back to Canada’s formative years. It is a novel that should cement his status as one of the most important Canadian writers working today, and, if all breaks right, one that will establish his name beyond our borders. The Orenda is by turns beautiful and brutal, harrowing and haunting, and the novel Boyden’s career has been building towards, even if he didn’t know it.

“This is a novel about my Jesuit blood, my Anishinaabe blood, my Indian blood. It’s a novel about where I grew up, and [a] part of Canadian history that’s just absolutely — to me — fascinating and incredibly rich,” he says, the evening sun slowly descending beneath the trees. “This is the novel I was always meant to write.”

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Boyden was born on Halloween, 1966, and grew up in Willowdale, a suburb of Toronto. His close-knit family consisted of Boyden, his three brothers and four sisters, plus three half-sisters from his father’s first marriage. His father was a doctor and decorated veteran of the Second World War, where he served as a surgeon. He died in 1975.

“I remember waking up super early, like 5:30 in the morning — it was still dark out — and getting up and just knowing something’s absolutely wrong,” recalls Boyden. “It felt like a pall had fallen over the household. And I remember walking into my parent’s room and seeing my mother sitting up, on her side of the bed, and her head in her hands, crying. My dad wasn’t there, and so I knew something bad had happened in the night while I was sleeping.”

In an early poem entitled “Daddy – February 13,” the date of his father’s death, Boyden writes about opening his father’s “black/doctor’s bag its smell/still of disinfectant/fifteen years later.” Later, finding a photo of his father from the 1930s, he remarks “you looked so much like me/staring sullen at the camera/fierce and stubborn slight/hint in your lips of that/abandoned little boy you/lost your father and I/lost you when we were/both eight years old.”

His mother went back to work, juggling her job as a special education teacher with raising a family of eight. “We were all hellions,” says Boyden, who was perhaps the most hellish of all. “In a family of black sheep, I guess I was maybe, possibly, in some ways, a little blacker than the others.”

He attended Brebeuf College School, a Jesuit institution on the border of Thornhill, and “tried desperately to get kicked out.” He’d discovered punk music as a teen, and the school represented “all the things I didn’t want to be as a punk-rock kid.” He scrawled anarchist symbols on his blazer, taped thumbtacks to his lapel and fashioned his hair into a Mohawk, hoping that would get him expelled, considering the school’s namesake had been tortured and killed by the Iroquois. He lasted until Grade 12, after which “they realized it was time to set me free.”

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He enrolled at York University, studying creative writing and the humanities. One of his professors, B.W. Powe, says that Boyden possessed “a quiet passion and a quiet intensity about him, a concentration and a receptivity that was easy to notice. [But] what I thought was most powerful about him was that he carried in himself the mark of determined solitude, the need to create something.

“There was something in him that made him memorable,” he adds. “I knew that he would do something — either kill somebody or write a book.”

He moved to New Orleans in 1992 to pursue his MFA. It was a difficult decision; he had a two-year-old son, Jacob, from a previous relationship, who stayed behind in Toronto.

It was in New Orleans he started writing fiction in earnest. “I wanted to be the next Jack Kerouac,” he says. “It was horrible, I’ll admit it. I tried to write the Great Canadian Novel having never written fiction before, jumped right into it and tortured my fellow students for about a year-and-a-half with awful, awful chapters. I think it was called Motorcycle Boy — you can get a feel for how bad it was.”

On the first day of class he met a young woman named Amanda — “the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.” They married shortly after graduation. In 1995, the couple moved to Toronto, but within months Boyden accepted a teaching job at Northern College’s Moosonee campus. He headed to James Bay, while Amanda, a gymnast, headed to Los Angeles to train with the circus and work as a stuntwoman. He spent two years in Northern Ontario, teaching and writing. “I loved that land desperately,” he says. It became the “well from which I drew, and still draw.” After two years apart, Joseph and Amanda (herself a published novelist) returned to New Orleans, which they still call home.

Around that time, his work caught the attention of Jan Jeffers (formerly Geddes) the co-founder of Cormorant Books, a small Toronto press, who was struck by “the clarity and beauty of his voice.” When she asked if he had a finished collection, he said yes.

“It was total bullshit,” he says. “I started writing, desperately, these stories and sending them to her. It didn’t take long for her to figure out I had fibbed, but she was OK with that. She said just keep writing.”

Born With A Tooth was published in 2001, but like many first collections it attracted little attention. (His current publisher recently reissued it after being out-of-print for several years). Three Day Road, on the other hand, the story of snipers Xavier Bird and Elijah Whiskeyjack, has sold almost 200,000 copies in Canada since 2005, and was published around the world. Through Black Spruce, which tells the story of Xavier’s son, Will, and Will’s niece, Annie, won the Giller Prize in 2008. I was on stage with Boyden moments after he won; when M.G. Vassanji offered his congratulations, I asked the two-time Giller Prize-winner if he had any advice to share with Boyden.

“Yes please!” said Boyden.

“I think he should just keep writing,” said Vassanji. “Just keep writing.”

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Sainte-Marie among the Hurons was established by French Jesuits in 1639, and abandoned a decade later; it was eventually rebuilt on the original site in what is now Midland, Ontario. Walking past the palisades and into the village one is transported back to the 17th century, when The Orenda is set. There’s a granary and refectory, a blacksmith and carpenter, a chapel and longhouses, where the Wendat, or Huron people, lived, filled with animal hides and pottery.

“One-fifth of the population of New France was here at one point,” says Boyden, surveying the village.

In the spring of 1649, the Iroquois, who were allied with the Dutch, assailed a series of settlements in the area. Hundreds of Wendat were killed, along with two Jesuits, Jean de Brébeauf and Gabriel Lalemant, whose remains now reside in Martyrs’ Shrine, which overlooks the rebuilt village. The timing was unexpected; though the Iroquois had attacked the village of St. Joseph the previous year, they usually arrived later in the summer. “It was very risky, but they figured [they’d] totally take them by surprise,” says Boyden. “And they sure did.”

While Sainte-Marie among the Hurons was spared, those sheltered behind its palisades fled to nearby Christian Island, which the Wendat called Gahoendoe. They spent a brutal hardship on the island, the Iroquois watching them from shore, before dispersing across the continent.

“I’m always amazed when someone says Canadian history is boring,” says Boyden. “It’s like, what the fuck? You don’t know the history. It’s really wild stuff.”

The Orenda is a deferential fictionalization of this period in Canadian history, telling the story of three people in the years leading up to 1649. There’s Bird, the leader of a Wendat village, still distraught over the death of his family at the hands of the Iroquois; in retaliation he kills the family of a headstrong young Iroquois girl, Snow Falls, and takes her as his daughter. Meanwhile, an idealistic young Jesuit named Christophe, known as “crow” because of his billowing black robe, arrives in Bird’s village, eager to convert the “sauvages” to the one true faith.

“I really wanted my protagonists to all be complex, and not wear a black hat or a white hat,” says Boyden, later, sitting on a dock on Christian Island. “I wanted them to feel real and complicated in what they wanted. They all want something, and sometimes that gets in the way of them being good people. Bird, certainly, is very complex and sometimes not all that likeable. Snow Falls can be a horrible girl. And Christophe” — loosely based on Brébeauf — “thinks he’s doing best, but he’s so stringent in his world view that he does damage.”

Christophe’s world view, anchored in his faith, clashes against that of the Wendat, which is rooted in the idea of the orenda, the life force that exists in everything — not only humans but, as he notes in a letter back to his superiors, “animals, trees, bodies of water, even rocks strewn on the ground. In fact, every last thing in their world contains its own spirit.”

While Christophe can perhaps be forgiven for misunderstanding the natives he encounters, these misunderstandings have continued throughout the years. One of Boyden’s goals with The Orenda was to accurately portray First Nations peoples, correcting the mistakes of other writers. Take another Canadian novel set in the same era, Brian Moore’s 1985 classic Black Robe.

“As amazing as Brian Moore is as a novelist, he really got things wrong. And I always wanted to correct that history.” What did he get wrong? “I feel he really misrepresented First Nations. He tried, but misrepresented them. They came off either as noble savages or as frightening warriors. And those are the clichés we all know. But the people are far more complex than that, and I wanted to show the complexity of life.”

That complexity includes their inclination to torture prisoners. And if there’s one thing that might harm The Orenda’s commercial appeal, it’s the book’s astonishing violence. “It’s the elephant in the room,” says Boyden. “Part of what I was wrestling with was I didn’t understand this Huron and Iroquois penchant for torture, and why they did it to each other. It took me a long time to figure out.”

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There’s a moment in Through Black Spruce when Will Bird calls stories “twisted things that come out no matter how we want them.” In the years since he wrote that sentence, Boyden learned exactly what his character meant.

Three Day Road and Through Black Spruce are the first parts of a trilogy, and although The Orenda is a standalone novel, it is definitely a spiritual precursor to his previous work.

“I don’t want to call it a prequel, because that sounds corny, but I think all my books, for some reason, are related genealogically,” he says. “I didn’t plan it that way, necessarily, at first.”

He didn’t do much planning, at all, when it came to The Orenda. He knew the overall shape, and, because of the historical records, how it would end, but “I had no big game plan. I had no big organizational strategy at all, other than I hope this goes somewhere.” He laughs. “It was like I got on a river and the current just sped up, and sped up, and I had no other choice than to just go with it.”

At first, it must have seemed as he was swimming against the current. It took Boyden almost three years to write The Orenda’s first 50 pages before “some kind of dam broke” and the remainder came rushing out in a little more than a year.

“I was worried that it would stall,” says his editor Nicole Winstanley, the president and publisher of Penguin Canada. “That he would get partway through this and think, ‘Maybe I’m not ready.’”

“It was a very difficult novel to write,” says Boyden. “Every page of this tore me in a different way.”

The hope is the hard work not only sustains his career in Canada but (re) launches him in the United States. While Three Day Road was a modest hit — it was picked for the Today Show book club, for instance — Through Black Spruce sold poorly. “Through Black Spruce was perceived, I think, as being more Canadian,” says his agent, Eric Simonoff, whereas Three Day Road was “positioned more as a World War One novel.” Boyden left Penguin US for Knopf, which will publish The Orenda next May under the auspices of legendary editor Gary Fisketjon, who tried to acquire Three Day Road a decade ago.

“I’ve read a lot about how important Joseph’s work is from a Canadian point-of-view, but I’d expand that, really, to a North American point-of-view,” says Fisketjon. “This book [presents] a moment of first contact, which defined so much of our history ever since. It’s an epic, epic story, and hugely ambitious.”

“I expect big things,” says Simonoff. “Joseph and I always saw The Orenda as a really big, very significant work of literary fiction. A potentially prize-winning book.”

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The day after he won the Giller Prize, I received an email from a Canadian writer wondering why I — and I’m paraphrasing from memory — had not yet written a takedown of Boyden’s work. In short, the writer claimed, Boyden was a fraud, a white man from Willowdale who’d successfully reinvented himself as a First Nations novelist.

“There’s always that ‘voice appropriation’ conversation,” sighs Winstanley. “I don’t think we, or he, have pretended that he isn’t. But these are the stories he feels really compelled to tell.” In any case, “he’s been very embraced by that community. So I feel that’s where the Joseph Boyden ‘takedown’ would come from if they felt like he was an outsider, or exploiting them in any way.”

It’s a charge Boyden, currently developing a series for CBC about a young boy growing up on a reserve near James Bay, takes seriously.

“I don’t want to be the wannabe Indian,” says Boyden. “I’m always very careful. I’m a mixed-blood person. I have Anishinaabe blood. I have Scottish blood. And I have Irish blood. All of them are equally important to me.

“I don’t like when somebody tries to play the Indian card too hard with me,” he continues. “No, I wasn’t raised on a reserve. I’m about 1/8 Indian, but it’s a very powerful part of where I come from and how I see the world. It always seems to me it’s the white world that wants to measure and quantify who you are and how much you are of something. With my very dear native friends across North America it’s never a matter of that. It’s a matter of how you see the world, and how you walk through the world.”

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The next morning, waiting on the kitchen table of the cottage where we slept, is a copy of a chapbook called “Songs of the Crossing” that Boyden — then known as Josef — published in 1990, while still a student at York. Only 35 copies were produced by “Fly-By-Night Press,” a far cry from the 30,000 hardcovers of The Orenda that will flood bookstores next week. The short biography reads, in part, that Boyden’s “mother thinks he is Canada’s greatest poet.”

“One day I’ll put together a book of poetry,” he says, standing at the coffee maker. “But better stuff. Not angst-ridden.”

He’s right. These are the words of a young writer finding his voice. He picks up the chapbook and reads one poem called “I had a dream.”